Welcome to the 2nd Summer Art Academy ‘Art Baltica’ 2008 in Kuršėnai!

Information by NGO “Kultūros Artelė“ / „Culture ArtFact”

PRESS RELEASE

21 July 2008, Vilnius

Welcome to the 2nd Summer Art Academy ‘Art Baltica’ 2008 in Kuršėnai!

The (international) second Summer Art Academy “Art Baltica” organised by the NGO “Culture Artfact”, will enliven Kuršėnai town and its environs with a creative uproar. Participants of the Academy settled at the Kuršėnai Children Foster Home include inmates of the foster home, kids of the neighbourhood, and children and youth from other parts of Lithuania.

For ten days – July 25th to August 5th – Kuršėnai Children Foster Home will be crowded more than usually. Participants of the Academy, who will gather here, will have an excellent opportunity to meet talented and creative contemporaries and the fold, create together with Lithuanian and foreign artists, listen to lectures and apply the knowledge they will gain here in their everyday life: at home and in communication with others.

Children will be able to choose some of the following activities according to their hobbies and needs: use psychodrama methods in revealing the possibilities of self-cognition, improve the relation between one’s body and soul with the help of yoga exercises, cultivate one’s imagination and creativity in the fields of audio, video or tactile arts, develop the image of a young artist, find out about youth fashion, learn German language and make music together with a guest from Germany, read fairy tales to the youngest inmates of the foster home on long summer evenings, write the camp diary and learn to present it to a wider audience, improvise with percussion instruments together with the well-known performer Hokshila. Some other activities will be offered as well: bicycle trips around regional parks and estates of Šiauliai district, meetings with local celebrities: folk artists, painters, guests of honour of the Summer Art Academy. And this is only a small part of the planned program.

Program of the camp will include various activities, yet the key focus of the Summer Art Academy is the art of communication, learning and paying attention to the people that surround you, work and create together with you. Sincere communication, healthy interrelations, and the ability to share are the key principles of the Summer Art Academy, which will form the entire creative atmosphere of the camp.

Speaking of problems in the language of art

The slogan of the Summer Art Academy “Create in Lithuania!” is quite idealistic considering that not a single Lithuanian authority (Department of Physical Education and Sports under the Government of the Republic of Lithuania, Culture and Sports Support Foundation, Ministry of Health, Department of Youth Affairs under the Government of the Republic of Lithuania, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education of the, Rural Sport and Culture Association of Lithuania “Nemunas”, as well as other state and municipal authorities we have contacted for financing purposes) has provided any financial support, though they should be interested in similar activities. Children will create and recreate in the camp thanks to private sponsors.

According to Ms. Odeta Abromavičiūtė, the Director of the NGO “Culture Artfact”, which organises the camp, the situation of cultural policy in Lithuania ‘lets us solve the problems of our country ourselves and try to public-spiritedly attract attention to them, speaking in the language of art’.

Arts 2 Heart

The best works created at the camp will be handed at the auction of “Juliukas Support and Charity Foundation”. Funds collected at the auction will be used to make dreams of children with cancer come true.

Members of the Kenyan organisation Nafsi Afrika Acrobats, who visited Panevėžys principal school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, Eičiūnai youth culture centre (Alytus district) and took part in the Užupis Festival in Vilnius in April 2008, have left to the NGO “Culture Artfact” some hand-made postcards and souvenirs. Funds collected from sale of these postcards will be forwarded to Kenyan children.

Participants of the Summer Art Academy: inmates of Kuršėnai Children Foster Home, young artists of Kuršėnai Art School, Lithuanian youth with eyesight disability, talented youth from different regions of Lithuania